


Room 512

by Animom



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh!
Genre: M/M, Melodrama, Necrophilia, Out of Character, Purple Prose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-12-22
Updated: 2003-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-14 05:14:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/145746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Animom/pseuds/Animom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The silence: when he held his breath, there was no sound but the thudding of his heart.</p><p>** KaiJou deathfic with overtones of necrophilia. Posted in all its histrionic glory for your lulz.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Room 512

**Author's Note:**

> Yu-Gi-Oh is the intellectual property of Kazuki Takahashi and Konami, and is being used in this fanfiction for fan purposes only. No infringement or disrespect is intended by this fanfiction.
> 
> Contains a brief but graphic description of injuries.

.

.

He always got to class early and read. It was easy to dial down his awareness of the thuds and squeals and inane babble as his classmates arrived, only turning his attention back outward when the hubbub receded at the teacher's entrance.

Today, though, the clamor was much less than usual. He looked up: two minutes to the bell, and 5 seats were still empty. Well, no wonder the din was so much less - among the missing were Jounouchi and Honda, who usually accounted for 90% of the pre-class noise. Then he realized that Mutou's seat was empty as well, and Mazaki's, and the quiet one with white hair.

The teacher came in, quite subdued, and after the morning greeting he was surprised that no one announced the five's tardiness. Had they all been excused for some reason? Unusual, this close to final examinations.

He heard odd snippets of conversation all day, but could make no sense of them, so as he took his shoes from his locker at the end of the day he asked one of the group of girls who always seemed to be giggling nearby (he knew they were known collectively as The Palm-Readers, but he never paid enough attention to them to know if it was the same girls from day to day), "Excuse me. Do you know Yuugi Mutou?"

The girl he'd spoken to had frozen as he spoke to her, her eyes shining. She nodded almost imperceptibly.

"Do you know why he wasn't in classes today?"

The second girl of the trio gasped, her hand flying to her mouth; the third said importantly, "Of course you don't read the common news, Prince Seto, so you wouldn't know about the accident."

 _Accident_? He nodded once, stiffly, booting his laptop as he walked out the front door of the school.

The search engine had results by the time the limo was pulling from the curb. "Tragic Accident kills 3, Injures 6 …" A bus had gone out of control during a street festival, jumping the curb and mowing down a family and several Domino High School students in front of –  _the Kame Game Shop._

"Stop at the hospital on the way home," he told his driver.

.

It was appalling how low-tech the hospital's wireless network was — he was able to establish a node in only a few minutes. Unsurprising, then, that the patient information was unencrypted. He scanned the admissions:

_Jounouchi Katsuya_  
_Bakura Ryou_  
_Honda Hiroto_  
_Mazaki Anzu_  
_Mutou Yuugi_

All but the first had been treated and released. Jounouchi's room number was 512.

It was a bit odd that no one stopped or questioned him, but after all he was well within visiting hours – not to mention that with the laptop under his arm and his confident stride, he supposed that he looked like a hospital administrator.

Room 512 was down a long corridor whose rooms seemed to be numbered at random: starting at 569, then went down by tens, but after 519 the numbering returned to 568 and went down by eights, stopped at 518, went back up to 567 ... So inefficient, having to look at every single door. Apropos that the blond was in a place where even the room numbering was annoying and irrational. Finally he arrived. He pushed open the door, a sarcastic comment already forming, but what he saw stopped him.

The far bed was unoccupied, its white sheets and thin blue blanket glowing with flat geometric precision in the cold grey light from the window. The near bed, though, was not empty, but neither could it be said to be occupied. A silver clipboard lay on top of a long lumpy shape under the sheet.

He stood, staring. No, there must been a mistake. That thing under the sheet couldn't be Jounouchi: Shadow Games hadn't stopped him. Cheaters and mind control and drowning and even being struck by lightening hadn't stopped him. He wouldn't have been done in by something as mundane as a bus.

He exhaled with determination, stepped up, and pulled the sheet down to uncover the face, the face that he was certain would not be Jounouchi.

Despite the cuts and scrapes Jounouchi seemed peacefully asleep, his dark eyelashes and pale violet lids making him look as though he was wearing makeup. Wisps of hair fanned over his forehead, clung to his cheeks.

"Stop this. You're not sleeping! Open your eyes and bark at me!"

A momentary fury clutched him: Why weren't there doctors, nurses, equipment in here? Why wasn't there that pandemonium that would keep someone alive, bring them back? But of course – they had been here. They had “done all they could” and then taken their machines and left. And soon, someone would come to take away the body, put it in a bag, and then a box, and then bury it in the ground, out of sight forever.

He thought the skin would be cold and clammy, but it was not. The factual part of his mind noted that since the body was still so warm, Jounouchi must have died only minutes ago ...

Duelist Kingdom. Even then, drilling through his desire to destroy Pegasus, had been the blond's annoying, unmistakeable presence. For a moment that evening their faces had been so close that Seto could have kissed him.

He wondered: what if he _had_? Wouldn't the universe have diverged at that point, wouldn't it have gone off on a different path all together from this one? In which he had thrown him aside, panicked at the surge of feelings for someone so unlike himself. In this universe, he'd poisoned every encounter, more afraid of something good than something painful.

The silence in the room congealed around him as it hit him that he was finally out of time. Jounouchi would never be back for more.

"No." He started CPR, pressing down hard on Jounouchi's chest, lumpy under the sheet, exerting all his force of will. "Come back, you asshole _._ " Faster and faster, frantic, until he heard a chord of cracking bones, and the faint susurrus of air.

He pulled the sheet down to see what he had done. Jounouchi's chest was misshapen, mottled with huge purple-black bruises, stained with brown surgical wash around the black-stitched incisions that gouged his chest. There was a hole the size of a quarter at the base of his throat. _Tracheotomy tube,_ a part of his brain supplied, while cold nausea and horror roiled in his own guts. It _was_ his fault that the blond was this –  _thing_ , pierced and broken. If he had just been true, weeks or months ago, they would be in a different universe now, a universe where Jounouchi wouldn't have been on the sidewalk that Friday night. Seto looked at the papery lips. Slightly parted, as if waiting for a kiss. Such a macabre cliché. He couldn't bring himself to do it, and so he thumbed back a eyelid instead, just to see that brown one more time, but the eyeball had rolled up back into the head and all he saw was bloodshot yellow-white, unseeing.

He wondered if he should try to cry. Weren't tears in fairy tales tears were magical? They broke evil spells, revived the dead, swayed Death's ferryman, ransomed kingdoms—but no, he was Seto Kaiba. He did not cry.

Not that it mattered. He wouldn't get another chance to do what he should have done. Another chance to hold him, fight and make up with him, find out how to make him laugh, his favorite foods, where he was ticklish, how he liked to be touched, what his skin tasted like, what it would feel to fall asleep next to him, what it would feel like to wake up next to him, to dance with him, watch movies with him, read by the fire with him, play in the snow with him ... no more chances to touch his hair and fuck him senseless and tell him he loved him.

He picked up the silver chart and read the information: _Name: Jounouchi Katsuya. Time of Death: 3:44 pm._ Seto wrote his name below Jounouchi's, checked his watch, added a second time, closed the chart, laid it on the body, left room 512, and climbed the stairs to the roof.

.

.

_The end._

_._

_._

_._

 

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you again to **Elf** for GBH info, especially on the tracheotomy tube.
> 
> Part of the genesis of this fic was angst-overflow from writing _Snowblind. Snowblind_ is about waiting until it's almost too late to tell someone how you feel about them; this fic is about never telling them. I also think that at some point Jacq had given me the link for a website that had a squick-fic contest, and I had joked that maybe I'd try to write a funny story about necrophilia. This fic turned out to be not funny, and only passingly about necrophilia.
> 
> I debated for a long time whether to keep this as a stand-alone fic or roll it into _Coming Clean_ as a dream sequence. I posted an earlier draft in my LJ in September 2003 and got a variety of responses (thank you **Loren, musouka, Nalan, Imbri** and **Skai)** , the deciding factor was the intersection of a long dry spell for writing _Coming Clean_ with the mod of The Dragon's Lair (a Kai/Jou Yahoo group), begging for fics at 3 am. I caved, edited, and posted.
> 
> As for the fic itself: 1) I decided to dub Seto's Fan Club the Tesoumi, "palm-readers", since I didn't find anything interesting for _se-to_ or _to-se._ Plus, it just seemed like a juicy irony considering Kaiba's general contempt for the paranormal. ~ 2) Admissions are actually sorted in hiragana order, I think. since Jo (Jyo) is based on ji + yo. ~ 
> 
> BTW, I consider the resolution of this fic to be massively OOC, as I believe Seto would rather writhe in pain for years than abandon Mokuba.  
> .  
>  _concept Sept 2003; first post 22 Dec 2003; edited for Ffnet repost Sept 11 2009; rev 8 Dec 2010_


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